Sketches in Christian Origins

Gospel of Judas in the News

UPDATE: The Gospel of Judas has now been published (see my post of Apr. 6, 2006)! Since quite a few people have been linking to this year-old post of mine, I decided to make part of this update in situ.

National Geographic has a big web site for it. Roger Pearse has collected some publicly released excerpts of it, here.

Judas starts out with:

The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover.

When Jesus appeared on earth, he performed miracles and great wonders for the salvation of humanity. And since some [walked] in the way of righteousness while others walked in their transgressions, the twelve disciples were called.

He began to speak with them about the mysteries beyond the world and what would take place at the end. Often he did not appear to his disciples as himself, but he was found among them as a child.

It ends with:

[…] Their high priests murmured because [he] had gone into the guest room for his prayer. But some scribes were there watching carefully in order to arrest him during the prayer, for they were afraid of the people, since he was regarded by all as a prophet. They approached Judas and said to him, “What are you doing here? You are Jesus’ disciple.”

Judas answered them as they wished. And he received some money and handed him over to them.

In between, there is a lot of that esoteric dialog that is reminiscent of some works in the Nag Hammadi library.

After the break are the contents of what this post contained from last year (2005), just after news appears that it had surfaced. Think of it as a time capsule…

LAST UPDATED: Apr. 7, 2005.

The Gospel of Judas (Iscariot, not Thomas) is in the news again. A Coptic manuscript of some 62 pages has popped up on the art/antiquities market in the past couple of years and is supposed to be a version of the otherwise lost Gospel of Judas mentioned by Irenaeus of Lyons in the 180s. It is now being edited and translated by Rodolphe Kasser of the University of Geneva.

The Australian Daily Telegraph now has an article about it: “Controversial gospel to be translated” (Mar. 30, 2005). The news article relies heavily on a person from a certain Maecenas Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, which seems to be involved in exploiting this document.

The article does not add much to what has been made public about it, but this bit of information seems new:

“We have just received the results of carbon dating: the text is older than we thought and dates back to a period between the beginning of the third and fourth centuries,” foundation director Mario Jean Roberty said.

It is not clear to me whether this statement reflects the common non-specialist confusion between a text and a manuscript, but it appears that the latter had been carbon dated to the third century. No word here on its paleographical dating, though.

Another aspect of the news article is no news: “‘We do not want to reveal the exceptional side of what we have,’ Mr Roberty said.” — except that “the Judas Iscariot text called into question some of the political principles of Christian doctrine.”

Nevertheless, that did not prevent the article having its Da Vinci Code moment:

The Roman Catholic Church limited the recognised gospels to the four in 325 AD, under the guidance of the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine.

Thirty other texts – some of which have been uncovered – were sidelined because “they were difficult to reconcile with what Constantine wanted as a political doctrine”, according to Mr Roberty.

Not this canard again. The canonization of the New Testament was a long process that began well before Constantine and ended decisively decades after him. As early as Irenaeus in the 180s, the direct precursors of the 4th cen. orthodox Christianity (whom Bart Ehrman calls the “proto-Orthodox”) had already limited the gospels they recognized to the four we know today: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Constantine’s political doctrines had nothing to do with the selection of the four or the exclusion of the others (many of which did not circulate widely and were not even known to the proto-Orthodox).

Given how Mr. Roberty is quoted, it is not clear whether he is fully responsible for this historical nonsense, so we’re faced with not uncommon problem of attributional abduction. Mark Liberman, “Attributional abduction strikes again,” Language Log (Feb. 4, 2004), offers this heuristic worth following:

And as I’ve also written before about such cases, in my experience it’s a good rule of thumb to blame the journalist — or the journalistic process, including the editor(s) and the headline writer — before blaming the scientist. Though Lord knows, scientists are not always blameless.

Previous coverage and links about the Gospel of Judas in Hypotyposeis include:

UPDATE: Michel van Rijn’s always provocative Arts News site has a lot more information about the manuscript and how it came to light, including an image of a Dutch-language news article written by Henk Schutten, “Evangelie van Judas opgedoken,” het Parool (Mar. 26, 2005). Particularly nice for Anglo-American readers, moreover, is an English-language translation he provided. The Schutten article features quotations from Gilles Quispel and Stephen Emmel, both highly regarded Coptic scholars, who state they had seen it much earlier.

As for the contents of this Gospel of Judas, the article does not say a whole lot, but it shows an image of a preliminary translation for one of the pages. (The translation is unattributed but its handwriting resembles that of Charlie Hedrick.) The image is rather fuzzy and sometimes hard to make out, so I’ll only mention that one sentence refers to Allogenes. A preliminary translation of the last page of the Gospel of Judas (this time explicitly attributed to Charlie Hedrick) is also found on the Art News website.

I have no idea what to make of it, and I await the official publication.

MORE: David Meadows of rogueclassicism has more information about the Maecenas foundation (Mar. 31, 2005).

P.S.: Another update Michel van Rijn’s Arts News features more translated pages of the Gospel of Judas by Charlie Hedrick and some images of the Coptic manuscript. What little of the text of the Gospel of Judas that has been divulged at that site reminds me of the works in the Nag Hammadi Library in content.

Roger Pearse of the Tertullian Project had put together a history of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library (“The Nag Hammadi discovery of manuscripts,” July 30, 2003). Of possible relevance to the Gospel of Judas is this bit of information (emphasis added):

The books were divided among the 7 camel-drivers present. According to ‘Ali there were 13 (our ‘codex XIII’ was not included in this number, as it was inside codex VI). Thus a codex was lost more or less at the site. Seven lots were drawn up. Covers were removed and each consisted of a complete codex plus part of another. The other drivers, ignorant of the value and afraid of sorcery and Muhammed ‘Ali, disclaimed any share, whereon he piled them all back together.

This missing codex has naturally led to rumors of another manuscript being out there (cf. “Furthermore, no-one can be sure whether the library found in 1945 is complete or whether there might be an additional book somewhere out there.” @ nag-hammadi.com). A French-language site, Albane, tries to track the so-called 14th codex through people who have tragically died or mysteriously disappeared.

UPDATE: Ben Brumfield of Horizon points out some dubious aspects of the press release for the Gospel of Jesus (“‘Launching’ Scholarship,” Apr. 4, 2005):

The most distressing part, however, is the concluding sentence:

The full launch is due in Easter 2006.

Since when is scholarship “launched”?

Good question. It’s making the publication of Gospel of Judas sound like a software release. Let’s hope that this isn’t implying that the percentage of marketing hype will be the same…. Brumfield also comments with some information on the background of the spokesperson for the Maecenas foundation:

It would also appear that Roberty is lawyer for a couple of shady antiquities dealers.

That probably explains the remarks about imputing Constantine’s politics into the selection of the gospels. Liberman’s heuristic for attributional abduction in blaming the journalist before the expert is premised on the presence of an expert.

MORE: Wieland Willker at the textualcriticism list (Apr. 7, 2005) points out that van Rijn’s Art News has made more text available of the Gospel of Judas. This part of Wieland’s assessment seems about right: “What I find curious is the very abrupt and unexpected end . . . The betrayal and everything else that happened is not reported. . . . Only the typical Gnostic aeon talk.”